I remember that. Those deskstar hard drives were pretty big and well priced, but they had a gigantic failure rate right out of the gate. But, by then, both Seagate and Western Digital had serious standing in the hard drive game, and people weren’t going to IBM for hard drives anymore.

But, the “click of death“ didn’t start with those drives, it just happened at such a high rate, that is how most people became familiar with that symptom of hard drive failure.